Another pause, this one shorter. Then Jackson made a sound that was almost a laugh in return, and something settled in my chest—not quite relief, not quite satisfaction, but something that made it easier to breathe for a second.
“Did I wake you?” I asked, already knowing the answer.
“Yes,” Jackson said. “But I was going to get up for water anyway. Baby’s sitting on my bladder again. Doctor says that’s normal for thirty weeks.”
We talked for forty minutes after that. Jackson told me about the rootstock in the fourth greenhouse—how the grape varieties were taking better than expected, how the drainage channel was holding despite the rain, how the shorter brother from town had suggested a different trellising pattern that would let more light reach the lower vines.
I told him about the mission—the parts I could talk about, the parts that weren’t classified—about the terrible coffee and the fluorescent lights and the dossier pages I’d read so many times the corners were soft.
Jackson asked about Sterling—whether he was there, whether he’d mentioned the ranch, whether he was stillplanning to send someone to check the perimeter while I was gone.
I answered each question with careful attention, watching my words the way I’d been trained to watch the horizon—methodically.
The conversation moved to the baby after that—Jackson describing the latest appointment, the doctor’s read on the growth charts, the way the baby had been quiet all morning and then active all afternoon.
“The name you floated,” Jackson said, his voice carrying the careful neutrality he used when he was three steps into whatever conversation he’d decided we were having. “Mateo. I’ve been thinking about it.”
The name had come up two weeks ago—a casual suggestion made at 3:17 in the morning, after sex and before sleep, the kind of statement that existed in the territory between serious and not.
I’d offered it and then immediately backed off—had said “just a thought” and “not attached to it” and “your call, full stop”—before Jackson could decide whether he was supposed to take it as a real suggestion or a hypothetical one.
He hadn’t rejected it. Hadn’t accepted it either—had just nodded once, slow, and changed the subject to the nursery paint color. I’d been choosing to interpret that as progress.
“I like it,” Jackson said now, his voice level. “But I want to see the baby first. Make sure it fits.”
The moment stretched between us—Jackson on the other end of a call I shouldn’t have made, me sitting in a safe house kitchen with the city noise coming through the window, both of us talking around the thing neither of us was saying.
“I understand,” I said, the words coming out before I could stop them. “Your call, full stop.”
Jackson was quiet for a beat—a silence that meant he was making a calculation, weighing risks against benefits, deciding exactly how much of himself to put on the line.
“I’m not saying no,” he said finally. “Just not saying yes yet. Okay?”
I nodded, even though he couldn’t see it. “Okay,” I said, and meant it enough to let it stand without adding anything else.
The conversation continued for another fifteen minutes after that—Jackson asking about the mission timeline, me asking about the greenhouse drainage, both of us talking around the thing neither of us was saying.
When we finally hung up, I sat in the dark of the safe house kitchen with my phone on the table and the city noise coming through the window, and tried to make sense of what was happening.
I thought about the nursery—the crib with the recessed hardware that wouldn’t catch small fingers, the rocking chair Jackson had driven forty minutes to pick up because the big-box ones “felt wrong,” the cedar-lined toy box at the foot of the crib that would smell like the forest even after everything else in the room had faded to the mix of baby and home that became its own kind of truth.
I thought about the note I’d left on the nightstand—“I’ll be home soon”—and the two-word answer Jackson had texted back—“I know”—and the rapid-fire questions that had followed, and the fact that Jackson had sent the baby update before he’d told anyone else.
I thought about a man who’d built an entire life around not needing anyone to stay, who had arranged his drawers and his days and his expectations around the certainty that no one would be there to catch him if he fell.
A man who was, by every available measure, waiting for me to come home.
I picked up my phone and pulled up flight options out of the city—not because the mission was done, but because I was already planning the hour it would be, already running the math on drive times from the nearest airport to the gravel road that led to the farmhouse.
The financial trace would close in twelve days if everything went according to schedule. Maybe ten, if the shell company pattern held and the bank cooperation came through faster than projected. Then another day for the operational report, another for Sterling’s approval, another for extraction.
Twelve days out. Maybe ten.
I set my phone face-down on the table—the same gesture Jackson had made on his porch rail the morning his parents arrived—and went back to work.
The dossier pages were stiff under my fingers. The city noise came through the window in its own rhythm. The refrigerator hummed at a pitch that settled somewhere between headache and back-of-mind irritant.
I turned another page and kept working.
